Helpful Job Resource Blog

What Are Behavioral Interview Questions

Jul 20, 2017 |

Employers, |

Mitchell Riley |

Number of Comments: 0

The more interviews you conduct the more often you’ll get the feeling that candidates answers to opinion based interview questions are rehearsed and extremely polished. With information becoming readily more accessible how do you get yourself ahead of the candidate to determine if they have the intangibles to thrive within your organization. The answer isn’t as simply as anyone would like it to be, but utilizing behavioral based interviews can help increase your chances of making a good hire.

What are behavioral based interview questions? A behavioral based interview question (also known as STAR Interview Questions) help determine a candidates behaviors during specific work situations. How someone behaved in the past can give you a good depiction about how they will respond during similar situations in the future. You should be looking for the following results when they are answering a behavioral based interview question, and it may take some follow up questions to guide them to this formulated response.

Situation: The situation is a brief description of the context of the story they will be explaining.

Task: They should explain the task they completed highlighting any challenges or constraints they faced.

Actions: They will describe the actions they had to take to overcome the task they were presented with, and highlight any desirable traits without outright stating them.

Results: Finally they’ll finish with the results of their actions highlighting any accomplishments they achieved.

So what are some examples of behavioral based interview question?

Describe a situation where you disagreed with a supervisor.

Tell me about a time you had conflict at work.

Give me an example of a time you motivated others.

Tell me a time when you missed an obvious solution to a problem.

Tell me about your proudest professional accomplishment.

Once you’ve asked the following questions to set up the Situation you’ll need to ask some improvised follow up questions to fully understand the entire context of the story. At that point guide them through the STAR acronym asking them about the actions they took to overcome this obstacle and the results of their actions.

Obviously there are plenty of behavioral based interview questions you can formulate or look up, but what are some of the most meaningful behavioral based interview questions? We recently read an article written by Jeff Haden, 4 Important Behavioral Questions, where he explains 4 behavioral interview questions that can tell you what a candidate is really like. You’ll want to read this article because he will explain the warning signs, and positive signs you’ll be looking for when asking these questions.

1.) Tell me about the toughest decision you’ve had to make in the past six months.

2.) Tell me about the last time a customer or co-worker got mad at you.

3.) Tell me about a time that you knew you were right, but still had to follow direction.

4.) Tell me about the list time your work day ended before you were able to get everything done.

We think you’ll find that these 4 questions can help you determine if a candidate is going to thrive in your organization. Keep in mind when evaluating their response what are the characteristics that make an A level employee in your organization, and what are the habits that you’re looking for in your next hire. Candidates that have worked within your industry have more than likely been successful themselves, or been around successful professionals, so they tend to know what skill set you’re looking for and can fake their way through that stage of the process. However, it is extremely difficult to fake their way through several follow up questions and formulate a real-life example on the spot for a behavioral based question. This is why it’s imperative to take your interview to the next level and begin to analyze the candidate’s personality and habits they formed throughout their career.